RavePopMattersFortunately Smith is as deft an essayist as she is a novelist. Her new collection of meditations on this peculiar time of liberty and captivity beguiles with its meticulous thought patterns, alluring felicities and rhapsodic turns of phrase ... as personal as it is political ... The essays are also nimble ruminations on vignettes from her daily life ... Regarding style, there can be no quibbling with this writer\'s contemplative and circumspect cadences; this is gleaming, wry, and crisp prose, which wears its erudition lightly but takes flight on both every day and lofty matters. Her musings on the plague of racism in the States and the police killing of George Floyd exhibit an actively curious, ferocious mind working at full pelt ... Smith has never been one for brow-beating or knee-jerk disembowelling. She eschews fervent and splenetic argument, the default online chatter mode. She writes as if she\'s probing her internal monologue responses and flexing her muscles before setting out on her modest epiphanies. Smith revels in the beckoning of uncertainty and the weighing up of possibilities before banishing unbidden intrusions of baggy conjecture to the back door ... Outward-facing, open-hearted and always attentive, her descriptions of people she knows from her neighbourhood strike an even-tempered tone between plaintive and droll. When she\'s incensed, she can really shift the gears ... For those of us who\'ve spent our quarantine time gobbling up Netflix rather than scratching an itch to pen the great novel we\'ve been putting off for years, we ought to be shamed by the fleet-footed vigour of these missives, yet Smith\'s lack of romanticism about the writing life is endearing ... reads less like an audit of Lock Down living than a dissection of absence and uncertainty. Her supple, gallant, and pensive writing explores the attachments that enrich and define us and suggests that these are the things that can sustain us as human beings, beyond our present predicament. An act of empathy and civility nudges the reader toward the light, to consider the case for optimism and grace amidst webs of dislocation and darkness.
